{"id":503,"date":"2013-07-13T01:28:25","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=503"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:28:25","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:28:25","slug":"20-book-2-canto-14-the-world-soul-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/28-savitri-volume-28\/20-book-2-canto-14-the-world-soul-vol-28-savitri-volume-28","title":{"rendered":"-20_Book 2 Canto 14 The World-Soul.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n\n
\n

 <\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n
\n

\nCanto Fourteen<\/i> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThe World-Soul<\/font><\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A covert answer to his seeking came.<\/p>\n

In a far-shimmering background of Mind-Space<\/p>\n

A glowing mouth was seen, a luminous shaft;<\/p>\n

A recluse-gate it seemed, musing on joy,<\/p>\n

A veiled retreat and escape to mystery.<\/p>\n

Away from the unsatisfied surface world<\/p>\n

It fled into the bosom of the unknown,<\/p>\n

A well, a tunnel of the depths of God.<\/p>\n

It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope<\/p>\n

Through many layers of formless voiceless self<\/p>\n

To reach the last profound of the world’s heart,<\/p>\n

And from that heart there surged a wordless call<\/p>\n

Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,<\/p>\n

Voicing some passionate unseen desire.<\/p>\n

As if a beckoning finger of secrecy<\/p>\n

Outstretched into a crystal mood of air,<\/p>\n

Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,<\/p>\n

As if a message from the world’s deep soul,<\/p>\n

An intimation of a lurking joy<\/p>\n

That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,<\/p>\n

There shimmered stealing out into the Mind<\/p>\n

A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,<\/p>\n

A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.<\/p>\n

As one drawn to his lost spiritual home<\/p>\n

Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,<\/p>\n

Into a passage dim and tremulous<\/p>\n

That clasped him in from day and night’s pursuit,<\/p>\n

He travelled led by a mysterious sound.<\/p>\n

A murmur, multitudinous and lone,<\/p>\n

All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.<\/p>\n

A hidden call to unforeseen delight <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 289<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

In the summoning voice of one long-known
\nand loved,<\/p>\n

But nameless to the unremembering mind,<\/p>\n

It led to rapture back the truant heart.<\/p>\n

The immortal cry
\nravished the captive ear,<\/p>\n

Then, lowering its imperious mystery,<\/p>\n

It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.<\/p>\n

It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute<\/p>\n

That roamed along the shores of memory<\/p>\n

And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.<\/p>\n

A cricket’s rash and fiery single note,<\/p>\n

It marked with shrill melody night’s moonless hush<\/p>\n

And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep<\/p>\n

Its high insistent magical reveille.<\/p>\n

A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells<\/p>\n

Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;<\/p>\n

Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:<\/p>\n

An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.<\/p>\n

Or from a far harmonious distance heard<\/p>\n

The tinkling pace of a long caravan<\/p>\n

It seemed at times, or a vast forest’s hymn,<\/p>\n

The solemn reminder of a temple gong,<\/p>\n

A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles<\/p>\n

Ardent with ecstasy in a slumberous noon,<\/p>\n

Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.<\/p>\n

An incense floated in the quivering air,<\/p>\n

A mystic happiness trembled in the breast<\/p>\n

As if the invisible Beloved had come<\/p>\n

Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face<\/p>\n

And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet<\/p>\n

And the world change with the beauty of a smile.<\/p>\n

Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,<\/p>\n

The home of a passion without name or voice,<\/p>\n

A depth he felt answering to every height,<\/p>\n

A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,<\/p>\n

A point that was the conscious knot of
\nspace,<\/p>\n

An hour eternal in the heart of Time. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 290<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

The silent soul of all the world was there:<\/p>\n

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,<\/p>\n

A single Person who was himself and all<\/p>\n

And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs<\/p>\n

Transfigured into beats divine and pure.<\/p>\n

One who could love without return for love,<\/p>\n

Meeting and turning to the best the worst,<\/p>\n

It healed the bitter
\ncruelties of earth<\/p>\n

Transforming all experience to delight;<\/p>\n

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth<\/p>\n

It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child<\/p>\n

And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;<\/p>\n

It led things evil towards their secret good,<\/p>\n

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;<\/p>\n

Its power was to reveal divinity.<\/p>\n

Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,<\/p>\n

It bore within itself a seed, a flame,<\/p>\n

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,<\/p>\n

A flame that cancels death in mortal things.<\/p>\n

All grew to all
\nkindred and self and near,<\/p>\n

The intimacy of God was everywhere,<\/p>\n

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,<\/p>\n

Distance could not divide, Time could not change.<\/p>\n

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,<\/p>\n

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,<\/p>\n

The throb of one adoration’s single bliss<\/p>\n

In a rapt ether of undying love.<\/p>\n

An inner happiness abode in all,<\/p>\n

A sense of universal harmonies,<\/p>\n

A measureless secure eternity<\/p>\n

Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.<\/p>\n

There was the welling core of finite life;<\/p>\n

A formless spirit became the soul of form.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All
\nthere was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:<\/p>\n

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 291<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

All here was known by a spiritual sense:<\/p>\n

Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one<\/p>\n

Seized on all things by a moved identity,<\/p>\n

A sympathy of self with other selves,<\/p>\n

The touch of consciousness on consciousness<\/p>\n

And being’s look on being with inmost gaze<\/p>\n

And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech<\/p>\n

And the unanimity of seeing minds<\/p>\n

In myriad forms luminous with the one God.<\/p>\n

Life was not there,
\nbut an impassioned force<\/p>\n

Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,<\/p>\n

Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,<\/p>\n

A quivering out from soul to answering soul,<\/p>\n

A mystic movement, a close influence,<\/p>\n

A free and happy and intense approach<\/p>\n

Of being to being with no screen or check,<\/p>\n

Without which life and love could never have been.<\/p>\n

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,<\/p>\n

The soul itself was its own deathless form<\/p>\n

And met at once the touch of other souls<\/p>\n

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.<\/p>\n

As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams<\/p>\n

And, conscious, knows the truth their figures mean,<\/p>\n

There where reality was its own dream,<\/p>\n

He knew things by their soul and not their shape:<\/p>\n

As those who have lived long made one in love<\/p>\n

Need word nor sign for heart’s reply to heart,<\/p>\n

He met and communed without bar of speech<\/p>\n

With beings unveiled by a material frame.<\/p>\n

There was a strange spiritual scenery,<\/p>\n

A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,<\/p>\n

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,<\/p>\n

And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,<\/p>\n

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,<\/p>\n

Its meditations of tinged reverie.<\/p>\n

Air was the breath of a pure infinite. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 292<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze<\/p>\n

As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers<\/p>\n

Had mingled to copy heaven’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Appealing to the soul and not the eye<\/p>\n

Beauty lived there at home in her own house,<\/p>\n

There all was beautiful by its own right<\/p>\n

And needed not the splendour of a robe.<\/p>\n

All objects were like bodies of the Gods,<\/p>\n

A spirit symbol environing a soul,<\/p>\n

For world and self were one reality. <\/p>\n

Immersed in voiceless internatal trance<\/p>\n

The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there<\/p>\n

In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.<\/p>\n

Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,<\/p>\n

Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,<\/p>\n

Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;<\/p>\n

They had returned into the world’s deep soul.<\/p>\n

All now was gathered into pregnant rest:<\/p>\n

Person and nature suffered a slumber change.<\/p>\n

In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,<\/p>\n

In a background memory’s foreseeing muse<\/p>\n

Prophetic of new personality<\/p>\n

Arranged the map of their coming destiny’s course:<\/p>\n

Heirs of their past, their future’s discoverers,<\/p>\n

Electors of their own self-chosen lot,<\/p>\n

They waited for the adventure of new life.<\/p>\n

A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,<\/p>\n

Although the same for ever in many shapes<\/p>\n

By the outward mind unrecognisable,<\/p>\n

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes<\/p>\n

Imprints through Time upon the earth’s worn page<\/p>\n

A growing figure of its secret self,<\/p>\n

And learns by experience what the spirit knew,<\/p>\n

Till it can see its truth alive and God.<\/p>\n

Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,<\/p>\n

The soul’s experiment of joy and grief <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 293<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,<\/p>\n

And venture on the
\nroads of circumstance<\/p>\n

Through inner movements and external scenes,<\/p>\n

Travelling to self across the forms of things.<\/p>\n

Into creation’s centre he had come.<\/p>\n

The spirit wandering from state to state<\/p>\n

Finds here the silence of its starting-point<\/p>\n

In the formless force and the still fixity<\/p>\n

And brooding passion of the world of Soul.<\/p>\n

All that is made and once again unmade,<\/p>\n

The calm persistent vision of the One<\/p>\n

Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:<\/p>\n

Forces and lives and beings and ideas<\/p>\n

Are taken into the stillness for a while;<\/p>\n

There they remould their purpose and their drift,<\/p>\n

Recast their nature and re-form their shape.<\/p>\n

Ever they change and changing ever grow,<\/p>\n

And passing through a fruitful stage of death<\/p>\n

And after long reconstituting sleep<\/p>\n

Resume their place in the process of the Gods<\/p>\n

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.<\/p>\n

Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.<\/p>\n

An interval was left twixt act and act,<\/p>\n

Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,<\/p>\n

A pause that gave new strength to do and be.<\/p>\n

Beyond were regions of delight and peace,<\/p>\n

Mute birth-places of light and hope and love,<\/p>\n

And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose.<\/p>\n

In a slumber of the voices of the world<\/p>\n

He of the eternal moment grew aware;<\/p>\n

His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense<\/p>\n

Knew by identity
\nwithout thought or word,<\/p>\n

His being saw itself without its veils,<\/p>\n

Life’s line fell from the spirit’s infinity.<\/p>\n

Along a road of pure interior light,<\/p>\n

Alone between tremendous Presences, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 294<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Under the watching eye of nameless Gods,<\/p>\n

His soul passed on, a single conscious power,<\/p>\n

Towards the end which ever begins again,<\/p>\n

Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm<\/p>\n

To the source of all things human and divine.<\/p>\n

There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise<\/p>\n

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,<\/p>\n

A single being in two bodies clasped,<\/p>\n

A diarchy of two united souls,<\/p>\n

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;<\/p>\n

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.<\/p>\n

Behind them in a morning dusk One stood<\/p>\n

Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.<\/p>\n

Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;<\/p>\n

Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,<\/p>\n

Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,<\/p>\n

She guards the austere approach to the Alone.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of each far-spread plane<\/p>\n

Pervading with her power the cosmic suns<\/p>\n

She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works<\/p>\n

And thinker of the symbol of its scene.<\/p>\n

Above them all she stands supporting all,<\/p>\n

The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled<\/p>\n

Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;<\/p>\n

The ages are the footfalls of her tread,<\/p>\n

Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,<\/p>\n

And all creation is her endless act.<\/p>\n

His spirit was made a vessel of her force;<\/p>\n

Mute in the fathomless passion of his will<\/p>\n

He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.<\/p>\n

Then in a sovereign answer to his heart<\/p>\n

A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,<\/p>\n

And from her raiment’s lustrous mystery raised<\/p>\n

One arm half-parted the eternal veil.<\/p>\n

A light appeared still and imperishable.<\/p>\n

Attracted to the large and luminous depths <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 295<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,<\/p>\n

He saw the mystic outline of a face.<\/p>\n

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,<\/p>\n

An atom of her illimitable self<\/p>\n

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,<\/p>\n

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean ecstasy,<\/p>\n

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,<\/p>\n

He cast from the rent stillness of his soul<\/p>\n

A cry of adoration and desire<\/p>\n

And the surrender of his boundless mind<\/p>\n

And the self-giving of his silent heart.<\/p>\n

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

End of Canto Fourteen <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 296<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Canto Fourteen    The World-Soul    A covert answer to his seeking came. In a far-shimmering background of Mind-Space A glowing mouth was seen,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-28-savitri-volume-28","wpcat-10-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}